Claude Nougat

about this book: Are your about to retire? Has your lifetime partner left you? Do you need to rethink your life?

Crimson Clouds explores the issues of our "second adulthood". It is all about romance the second time around. A passionate search for self by a man who has just retired from a brilliant career, a desperate effort by his wife to save their 20-year marriage: a life with no love is a life wasted.

Robert, just retired from a brilliant career as a UN manager, pursues a childhood dream of being an artist. His academic paintings dismay his wife, a lover of Contemporary Art. They fight over art, he’s square, she’s cool, but what threatens their marriage is a secret she has never revealed. They separate, he goes to live in Italy, she stays in New York. Other women enter his life, Natasha, a fiery childhood friend who’s become an affirmed art photographer and her daughter Noor, young, beautiful and deeply troubled. He discovers passion but true love and happiness still elude him. His wife returns, attracted by one of his poetic doodles “Crimson Clouds…roll in the sky…the memory of a lost love lingers on”. Can she regain that lost love?

This novel reveals the wistfulness of mature passion and delves into the complexities of self-discovery after a lifetime of work. It will take you to New York, Paris and London and in the Italian countryside, in an old house overlooking Lake Trasimeno. It will also show you the hidden workings and dangerous trappings of an alluring world that is still little known, that of Contemporary Art.

NOTE to the reader: this is a fully revised new edition of "A Hook in the Sky", hailed a "quintessential Boomer Lit novel" when it first came out in 2012.

Other books by Claude Nougat

A fun read about what happens to you after retirement

First I must confess to you I'm myself retired and I remember how I used to wonder what would happen to me after retirement, particularly as I'm not a painter and I'm not a writer. I found Claude Nougat's book fun to read because it depicts what happens to someone who tried to become an artist. He lives through a number of amazing experiences and achieves the sort of success that he had never actually wanted.

Also I enjoyed reading about this quiet man who, when he goes into retirement, is suddenly faced with new, unexpected love affairs. Read it and let me know what you think of it! [by Giuseppe Bonanno]